West Brom 1-2 Southampton: Saints must use use Cup joy to move forward

Mauricio Pellegrino is delighted Saints have made it into the quarter-finals of the FA Cup for the first time in 13 years – but has told his players to forget about it for now.

Saints secured a morale boosting place in the last eight courtesy of a 2-1 win against Premier League relegation rivals West Brom at The Hawthorns.

It leaves them just a win away from a Wembley semi-final, but though Pellegrino is pleased with the confidence shot victory gives his team, he wants to immediately focus back on the battle for top flight survival.

“Like every single weekend we have to improve and draw some conclusions about the positive and negative things,” said Pellegrino.

“We have to work this week because every single game from now will be more important.

“I think it’s important for many reasons.

“The first one is the belief of the team improves and in our way sometimes you can have a good game, a bad game, but the spirit of the team was really good.

“It was something we were talking about last week and even in difficult situations like at the end we were there competing well with good concentration, we were focussed.

“I think when you play against this side in physical battle they are really strong and try to put the opponent under pressure all the time and we didn’t concede in set plays and that is important.

“Also we give the opportunity to other players that didn’t play too much in the last couple of months and we move to the next round which is the most important.”

He added: “I think it helps everybody to increase our confidence, our spirit when you are in a difficult situation. We have many important games the next hundred days until the end and for us it’s really important when we can recover some players like Nathan and everybody is ready to help the club.”

While many Premier League managers have questioned the importance of the Cup, particularly when battling relegation, Pellegrino sees no reason it isn’t anything other than hugely positive for Saints.

“It depends how do you see this possibility?

“For us it’s important to move to the next round because it helps the club, the players, the manager, our supporters and everybody is happy.

“Obviously the difficult thing is when you have got two important games in three or four days but this is another question.

“When you have two games in three or four days like Champions League teams do and this is the main question.

“When you have got plenty of time there doesn’t exist any reason to be unhappy.”

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